The present proposal is submitted in the interest of furthering our understanding of the cause(s) of specific reading disability as well as to facilitate continuance of programmatic research already initiated in the area. Previous research in the area has focused primarily on three major hypotheses in explanation of reading disability: the perceptual deficit hypothesis, the intersensory deficit hypothesis, and the verbal deficit hypothesis. Our research to date, along with the findings of others, cast serious doubt on the validity of the first two of these, and provide suggestive evidence for the third. Thus, we are interested in continuing our exploration of the verbal deficit hypothesis. We propose to test this notion in four separate experiments. One will investigate the possibility that poor readers sustain deficiencies in phonologic processing. Two others will investigate the belief of some that reading disability is associated with semantic encoding and verbal mediation problems. And a fourth will explore the alternative possibilities that disorder in reading issues from dysfunction in inter-versus intra-hemispheric processing. We are also interested in comparing age differences among reader groups; thus, we will contrast the performance of poor and normal readers in second and sixth grades.